Details on today’s Google Buzz API announcement

By Kevin White | 5 years agoMay 19, 2010

Facebook and Twitter gained traction with websites that enabled seamless sharing through their APIs to the news feed. Yahoo, LinkedIn and MySpace followed their lead, providing this powerful sharing capability. A few months ago, Google introduced a news feed service called Google Buzz, offered to Gmail users. That first generation of Google Buzz offered publishers a “Buzz” button, enabling write-only access to the newsfeed. Now it has become far more powerful.

Today, Google announced an API for Google Buzz that offers read-write access similar to the Facebook Graph API (the new Facebook Connect) and Twitter API. The API enables:

Authentication

Getting user profile data

Getting contacts

Sharing simple and rich newsfeed items

Getting list of followers (new)

Getting list of who users follows (new)

Follow / Unfollow (new)

Group related functions

Retrieve users newsfeed and perform newsfeed-related functions

Search in public newsfeed

Search for nearby places

Post activities with location data

One of the reasons we are excited about this announcement is that it means Gigya clients have the opportunity for greater exposure when users share. Our data shows that as many as 20% of users choose Google as the identity they choose when connecting on a publisher site.

There is significant momentum behind the Big 3 going social. Just a few weeks ago at TheNextWeb conference in Amsterdam, Microsoft presented a similar product as part of their new social API service, demoing the product through a Gigya implementation on CBSnews.com.

As always, Gigya is simplifying access to this functionality for its customers. In our coming release, our customers will be able to easily enable Google Buzz as part of the overall platform.